


show a little faith, there's magic in the night (you ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right)

by soaringrachel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Driving, F/M, Falling In Love, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel/pseuds/soaringrachel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott always forgets that, just like he forgets he can't lean over and kiss Stiles in the middle of physics, just like he forgets that Melissa knows more than she lets on, just like he forgets that maybe Stiles and Allison going for a drive alone isn't what either of them were hoping to do tonight. But here he is like an idiot, pulled up at the end of Elm Street (there aren't any elms on it) waiting for Allison to show, afraid she won't, afraid she will, afraid she won't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	show a little faith, there's magic in the night (you ain't a beauty, but hey, you're all right)

**Author's Note:**

> Embarrassingly long title from Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road". Probably would've made the whole song the title if I could've. ("all the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood") Also special thanks to Rachel for putting up with me moaning over these two thousand words for four months, oops.

Stiles pulls up down the block from the Argents' house. Not out front, never out front. Scott always forgets that, just like he forgets he can't lean over and kiss Stiles in the middle of physics, just like he forgets that Melissa knows more than she lets on, just like he forgets that maybe Stiles and Allison going for a drive alone isn't what either of them were hoping to do tonight. But here he is like an idiot, pulled up at the end of Elm Street (there aren't any elms on it) waiting for Allison to show, afraid she won't, afraid she will, afraid she won't.

 

Allison glances at her phone. Two texts.

 _I'm down the block_ from Stiles.

 _love u_ from Scott.

She changes her earring and shrugs on a jean jacket and texts Scott back, _you too_. Leaves the lipgloss on her dresser and grabs her crossbow and sneaks downstairs.

 

Stiles drums his fingers against the wheel, left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left. Four fingers, two fingers, three fingers, four. He drums his fingers and he chews his lip and he thinks about Allison, thinks about Allison's hair in his mouth, think's about Allison's teeth on his neck, thinks about Allison's body surprising under his hands, thinks about Allison kissing Scott hello in the morning and just looking at him, because nobody can know, or maybe that's only why for him, or maybe that's not why for either of them.

Stiles taps his toes inside his shoe, a-one two three four like he learned in the middle school band, and he wishes Scott were there and he's nervous and excited, like you can have a first date with someone when you can bring to mind, sitting in the car and waiting, the shape of her half-smiling lips, the feel of the callus on her index finger, the taste of her hair in your mouth.

 

Allison fully realizes she doesn't have to go.

She doesn't have to climb into the Jeep and avoid noticing there's plenty of room for once. She doesn't have to awkwardly ask about English homework. She doesn't have to wonder whether Stiles would like it if she leaned in for a kiss. She doesn't have to wonder if she would.

But Allison realizes, if not fully, that she is going to be just as in love with Stiles Stilinski as she is with Scott McCall, provided she gets in the Jeep, provided she makes conversation, provided she does lean in for that kiss.

She's not in love with Stiles, not quite. But she thinks she maybe wants to be.

She slips out the back door and down the street and into the passenger seat as if in one motion, because she knows she doesn't have to and that means she might not.

 

When Stiles was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen he was in love with two different people, a boy and a girl. He was in love with Scott McCall, and he was in love with Lydia Martin.

He didn't exactly view the two as incompatible, given that they were both firmly one-sided; Scott was a boy, and a boy who liked girls, and Lydia was a girl, and a girl who boys liked. And Stiles? Stiles was nobody much.

So he alternated fantasies and he traded off stares at the backs of necks and his dreams were full of light red hair that turned to dark, dark brown and back, and it was a manageable situation. It was something he was used to, even something he liked.

At sixteen and seventeen, Stiles is in love with two different people, a boy and a girl. He's in love with Scott McCall and Allison Argent. He doesn't exactly view the two as incompatible, but he doesn't _not_.

 

They're silent for a few long moments as Stiles drives toward the edge of town, toward a black and overgrown vacant lot just too small to earn the name of forest.

"What's out there?" Allison whispers, and Stiles grins wildly.

"Hell if I know," he says, "don't you?"

They stare at each other for a second, and then Allison laughs, and then Stiles does, and she watches his face wrinkle and she almost expects smiling eyes behind dark lashes to flash through her mind, but they don't. All she sees is Stiles, and she does lean in for that kiss, but they're laughing too hard—hysteric, almost, and their teeth bump together.

It just makes them laugh harder, until Allison at least feels she's lost control of the moment, and she sobers, and a moment later he does too.

She does kiss him, once, on the temple, in the moment where they're almost back to normal but not quite.

 

If you asked Stiles Stilinski what was the scariest thing he'd ever done, he wouldn't say running from werewolves that wanted to kill him, or running toward werewolves that might. He wouldn't say learning how to shoot a gun or saying to someone for the first time, "Actually, I like boys too."

He'd say the scariest thing he ever did was fall out of love with Lydia Martin.

It wasn't losing her. Stiles never had her, Stiles never could have, never would have, wouldn't have known what to do with her if he did. But Stiles since he was eight years old had been a person who was in love with Lydia Martin like he was a person with brown hair who talked too much.

So Stiles, sitting in the driver's seat watching the moon move across the sky, knows that being in love with someone changes who you are. So Stiles, eyes glancing up at the sky and down at the forest and over to the girl in the jean jacket somehow managing to focus, wonders if she knows that too. (He's pretty sure Scott doesn't, even though being in love's who Scott is maybe most out of all of them, even though Stiles isn't always sure he and Allison count as being in love at all, when you look at Scott.)

 

 

Allison runs her thumb across the ridge of her bow, takes quiet, measured, breaths and watches the forest. Next to her Stiles can't focus. _What else is new?_ she thinks, and almost blushes at a memory of Stiles' mouth flying from Scott's ear to her cheek to his shoulder to her lips.

It's stupid, she thinks, this acknowledging and not; it's not like they're distant when they're all together, her and Stiles' bond just as strong in the moment as her and Scott's. It's out of the moment that's confusing, different, and she doesn't know whether this is a moment or not.

She doesn't like—no, she _hates_ —having to pretend. It doesn't work; it never works out.

 

It's one in the morning and Stiles is pretty sure nothing is gonna show.

"Fuck," he mutters, not quite under his breath because he's never been good at that, and Allison startles. He feels a little bad; he thought she was in some kind of surveillance trance deep enough he wouldn't pull her out.

"What's wrong?" she asks, "You see something?"

"Yeah," Stiles says, "a wasted night." He's got a gun under the seat and he takes it out and carefully unloads it while Allison watches.

"Nothing's gonna show," he says, and Allison nods, collapses her own weapon and tucks that away too. "Let's drive," she says, and Stiles knows she doesn't mean "Let's go home."

 

Allison opens the window; there's enough wind, plus the noise of the Jeep, that conversation is out of the picture. On a cool night like this Scott would stick his head out the window (like a dog, Allison never says, and Stiles always does), but the wind makes Allison's eyes water, so she twists around until she's facing Stiles and reaches up to let her hair tumble down and stream out behind her. Stiles smiles, a little quirk of his lips with his eyes on the road, and Allison watches him drive, chewing his lip and tapping out the rhythm to some song on the wheel.

He's a good driver.

 

It's very dark and there aren't too many lights on this old road around the edge of the town, except where it joins up with the interstate and they passed that a while back. So it's just Allison and Stiles and the headlights and the little pocket flashlight on his keychain, glowing on the nightlight setting. That and whatever's out there in the dark, because Stiles has known there's always _something_ since the day he went to look for a dead woman just for fun, and doesn't that say everything about who Stiles used to be, that he thought mutilated corpses made for a fun way to spend an evening.

Now he's pretty damn glad to have avoided any death and destruction on his Saturday evening, even if shooting something nasty and evil might've made him less likely to wear a hole through the steering wheel with his tapping fingers on the ride back to town. Allison's hair is streaming out the window; she's got a sweet, sweet smile on her face and Stiles realizes with a jolt how beautiful she is.

Not that he hadn't realized before. But. She looks happy, here in the car with him and the little pocket flashlight.

Stiles wonders if he should drive somewhere so they can make out in the car, which is what he would do if Scott were here. But he’s so tired he aches in ways he always forgets you can ache, and Scott’s not here, he realizes; he turns to Allison and says, “God, I’m tired.”

 

Allison’s tired too, she realizes, and she gives him a wincing little look and his tongue pokes out at her for a second. She laughs and her hand darts out to his shoulder and she says, “Take me home.”

She likes seeing the road home from up high like this, a different angle than she’s used to like peering out the window of the school bus when she was a little girl. Allison’s not much of a dreamer, but she used to dream on buses and she dreams here in the Jeep—strange concrete dreams about making copies of keys and shopping at Pottery Barn. The road looks strange but at her left Stiles looks terribly familiar, both hands on the steering wheel and bottom lip loose between his teeth. She wants to invite him in when she gets home, even though she knows she can’t, wants to take that bottom lip between her own teeth and maybe fall asleep just like that. She wants to wake up and see a text on her phone, _love u_ from Scott, and lean over and see the matching one on his, _love u_ too.

 

Stiles pulls up down the block from the Argents’ house. Not out front. Stiles leans over and kisses the top of Allison’s head, kisses her hair, and waits for her to pull him down and kiss him really, kiss him deep and nice and strong.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she says, and he thinks one of them says “love you,” or both of them, or maybe Stiles just thinks it, and then Allison is gone, and then Stiles turns his key and he is too.


End file.
